So we've got Alien 5 coming from Blomkamp; Prometheus 2 from Ridley Scott; and then all of this great material on the side in the form of games (Alien: Isolation), comics (Fire and Stone), and books (last year's trilogy of novels from Titan books; the upcoming Rage War).
It's a lot of stuff, and I'm excited for all of it...but one thing that would make me feel a lot more hopeful about the future of the franchise would be if 20th Century Fox were to maybe announce some sort of formal "story group," like the one announced with Star Wars and even more recently Transformers. The nice thing about announcing the creation of such a group, tasked specifically with charting the franchise's overall narrative going forward, is that it a.) serves as a nice, official "reset" of the plot up to that point, stabilizing and concretely defining what is and isn't canon as we move into the future, and b.) it lends confidence to the idea that there is an actual captain steering this ship. As much as I've enjoyed much of the Alien/Predator EU over the last few decades, one thing that has been severely lacking to everything that we've gotten is any sort of core structure; we've gotten tons of comics and books and games, many of them from very gifted creators, but taken as a whole, it's more or less just a hodgepodge of stories.
That approach has its advantages, I admit...but looking at the variety of different projects coming our way from Fox, Titan Books, Dark Horse Comics, and Creative Assembly, it strikes me that the smarter–and more satisfying– approach might be to do something akin to what Disney has done, tying in the projects of Del Rey, Marvel, and various other companies, in an effort to create a more cohesive tapestry. Putting an official story group in charge of the Alien/Predator/Prometheus universe seems, at least to me, to be the smart move. Thoughts?
